Helmut Schmidt, a man of will and cigarettes

Helmut Schmidt, who died Tuesday at the age of 96, was the grand old man of German politics, its second postwar Social Democratic chancellor and the man who consolidated Germany’s economic miracle while keeping the country firmly locked in the NATO alliance.

Cool-headed, brusque, at times sarcastic and often impatient, Schmidt presided over the consolidation of German economic power and political stability at a time when it was buffeted by the terrorist attacks of the home-grown Red Army Faction and the economic turmoil caused by the huge rise in the price of oil in the mid-1970s. He backed the unpopular deployment of NATO medium-range missiles on German soil in defiance of Soviet attempts to woo Germany away from the alliance, but also continued the détente policies of Willy Brandt, his predecessor, steering a careful path in deepening and consolidating relations with Russia and Germany’s Warsaw Pact neighbors.

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Schmidt’s lasting achievement was to anchor German social democracy firmly in the political center ground, rejecting the party’s earlier more radically socialist philosophy and ensuring a working partnership between government and German industry.

He also continued the strongly pro-European policies of Germany’s first three Christian Democratic chancellors, and built on the country’s key treaty relationship with France. He forged a strong bond with President Giscard d’Estaing, and together they laid the foundations of the annual gathering of Western leaders which was to become the G7 and then the G8. As chancellor, Schmidt played a key role in the moves that eventually led to the introduction of the European single currency by establishing, with other core European Union members, the exchange rate mechanism to stabilize European currencies.

Respected rather than loved by voters, Schmidt had none of the emotional charisma of Willy Brandt, whom he succeeded as chancellor after Brandt was brought down by a spy scandal. He had little time for politics based on emotion or abstracts — as he once memorably said, “Anyone who has visions should see a doctor.” But Schmidt was a superb organizer — unflappable, pragmatic and far-sighted.

Schmidt first demonstrated this gift for getting things done as a young interior minister in his native city-state of Hamburg, when he took charge of the clean-up and repairs to the battered city after devastating floods in 1961. He made his name in the city and in the SPD, the German Social Democrats then in opposition at federal level. In 1969 he joined Brandt’s government as defense minister, where he first demonstrated his competence in the administration of Germany’s large armed forces and in his close partnership with Germany’s NATO allies, especially the United States.

He was promoted later to the key posts of finance and economy minister, where he consolidated the extraordinary growth of the Germany economy over the previous two decades and was shrewd enough to see the dangers of the rise in global oil prices pushed through by Arab producers after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

On becoming chancellor in 1974, Schmidt continued the dogged pursuit of Brandt’s Ostpolitik, which had raised doubts in America and in other Western nations but which was popular at home and was beginning to crack open, slowly, the barriers thrown up by the East German communists. The number of family reunion visits to East Germany increased, pragmatic co-operation in the divided city of Berlin became more established, and Schmidt became a regular visitor to Moscow.

He never lost his suspicion of communist intentions, however, or softened his determination to keep Germany anchored in the West, despite a growing pacifist mood in the country and the emergence of the Greens as a political force. His firmness was soon tested by the terrorist threat posed by the so-called Baader-Meinhof gang and its transformation into the ruthless anti-capitalist and Marxist Red Army Faction (RAF). A series of killings and bombings by the RAF, including the kidnapping and murder of several high-profile bankers and industrialists, provoked a sense of public panic, especially during the autumn of violence in 1977.

Schmidt, as always, kept his head. He made no concessions to terrorist demands. He used the police to hunt down RAF members and sympathizers. And when Palestinian terrorists seized a Lufthansa plane flying to Frankfurt and forced it to fly to Mogadishu, Schmidt ignored the demands to release imprisoned RAF leaders and ordered commandos to attack the plane. Their textbook operation, killing the hijackers and freeing the passengers, earned Schmidt considerable popularity. The same day three leaders of the RAF committed suicide in their prison cells. The terrorist threat gradually receded from that day onward.

Schmidt stood equally firmly against Moscow’s demand that Germany refuse America’s proposal to station new Pershing and Cruise missiles on German soil to counter the large deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles. There were riots and demonstrations, especially in West Berlin. The SPD youth wing strongly opposed the party leadership, and many senior ministers were also unhappy. But the missiles began to be deployed — and the Soviet Union blinked, agreeing, after all, to resume talks on arms reductions.

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Helmut Schmidt was born in Hamburg in 1918, the son of two teachers. His grandfather had been a docker, and his father was the illegitimate son of a Jewish banker — a fact that the family managed to keep hidden during the Nazi period. Like all young German men, Schmidt was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and served on the eastern front — a brutal experience that he only occasionally spoke about. He also served on the Western front toward the end of the war, where he was captured by the British forces. He married his childhood sweetheart Loki and was married for 68 years until her death in 2010. They had a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter Susanne. Theirs was a happy marriage — though eyebrows were raised when he revealed in a book that years earlier he had had a mistress.

Schmidt had wanted to train as an architect, but the war prevented that. So in 1953 he entered the Bundestag. He was very much a man of his city — cool, cultured, pragmatic. Short, trim with a lock of silver hair, he was an accomplished classical pianist and released a number of recordings. He spoke English fluently. He was often seen at concerts and theatres. The contrast with his successor Helmut Kohl, a more earthy provincial politician, was marked — and there was an element of social and intellectual snobbery in Schmidt’s dismissive response to his successor, as well as resentment at the way his government was brought down by the defection in 1982 of the Free Democrats, the junior partner in the SPD-FDP coalition.

In retirement Schmidt continued to speak out strongly on world affairs. He was often exasperated by U.S. politics: he had been openly contemptuous of Jimmy Carter as ineffective, but he also had little time for the American right wing. He urged the U.S. to continue dialogue with Moscow even after the invasion of Afghanistan, and he expressed impatience at what he saw as the naïve policies of Washington. He had little affection for Margaret Thatcher either — and her policies were strongly influenced by his early patronizing rejection of her demand for a budget rebate for Britain.

Schmidt’s views were often reflected in the weekly Hamburg-based newspaper Die Zeit, where he took the role of joint publisher. He kept day-to-day control and continued working in the paper’s offices until well into his 90s — always wreathed in a cloud of cigarette smoke. He was, perhaps, Germany’s most famous and defiant smoker, and for him alone the no-smoking rules were waived during broadcasts and in public places. The mass circulation Bild newspaper, publishing his sharpest remarks on his 90th birthday, quoted his advice to aspiring politicians: “One needs the will. And the cigarettes”.

Michael Binyon is a foreign affairs analyst and former diplomatic editor of the Times of London.